Just A Car Guy: Robert Moses, a prominent 20th-century NYC planner, intentionally designed overpasses on the Southern State Parkway at a low height that busses couldn't pass under, because this would prevent low income bus riders from getting to Jones beach

Saturday, January 24, 2026

Robert Moses, a prominent 20th-century NYC planner, intentionally designed overpasses on the Southern State Parkway at a low height that busses couldn't pass under, because this would prevent low income bus riders from getting to Jones beach

This tactic in the late 1920s while FDR was the governor, was aimed at restricting access to public, city-funded beaches, enforcing segregation through, rather than of, infrastructure.

Allegedly some critics have argued that Moses utilized various urban planning techniques to disrupt Black and Latino communities, including constructing highways directly through these neighborhoods, such as the Cross Bronx Expressway. In order to build the Southern State, many Long Island farmers were either forced off their land or required to sell portions of their farms.

The overpass bridges were made infamous in Robert A. Caro’s monumental 1974 biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, who modernized Gotham for the motor age, though Moses never learned to drive.

In one of the 1,300-page, Pulitzer-winning book's most memorable passages, Caro reveals that Moses ordered his engineers to build the bridges low over the parkway to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach—buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans Moses despised.

Caro described Moses as “the most racist human being I had ever really encountered.” The evidence is legion: minority neighborhoods bulldozed for urban renewal projects

Thomas J. Campanella, a professor at Cornell University, a historian and a writer on city planning and the urban environment, sees the potential evidence of discrimination in the lower height of the Southern State bridges compared with those on other parkways Moses designed.